Internet search engines, such as MSN® Search, serve as information gateways to Internet users by accumulating and categorizing information, and providing a wide array of services. Specialized Internet businesses (“partners”) often seek to drive highly qualified traffic to their sites by partnering with Internet search engines in order to improve the indexing of their content. This approach helps to draw traffic, but has several drawbacks. One is that in order to achieve good indexing, the partners' web pages typically must be tagged with good keywords and phrases and have good summaries. Generally, determining these keywords and phrases, and writing these summaries is not in the core competency of the Internet businesses, i.e., they know how to manage their business, but not how to prepare data for searching by users.
Another problem is that the latency of updating the index created by the search engine can be quite long. It is possible that individual web pages may be indexed as infrequently as once every couple of months. A tremendous amount of information can change in that time period, such as pricing and inventory, thus limiting the quality of the indexed data.
Yet another problem is that many partners' websites are data-driven or dynamic. This means that they do not actually have physical pages for all their content on their site, but rather generate the pages from a database in response to user queries. Dynamic content is very difficult for search engines to discover and index.
Another problem associated with partnering with search engines is that search engines handle significantly more traffic than the partners' sites. If all queries were forwarded to the partners for resolution, the partners would have to make substantial hardware and network infrastructure investments just to handle the traffic. Meanwhile, most queries would be irrelevant as only a very small percentage of the total traffic would be for the goods and services offered by the partner.
Many conventional implementations for searching partner websites attempt to address this irrelevance problem by requiring the end-user to specify the websites that should be searched or by linking the searching to categories in a taxonomy. Both of these approaches require that the user either implicitly or explicitly select the websites to be searched. Given the large number of websites, this approach quickly overwhelms the user by requiring them to do burdensome setup work just to perform what they perceive as a simple search.
Complicating this further is that end-users are very imperfect in how they formulate queries. In particular, queries often contain misspelled entries, acronyms, improper spacing between words, etc. A cursory study of the ways that users searched for hotels using the MSN Search® service in April 2002 indicates that approximately 50% of the queries were malformed. Typically, websites do not support searching for content where the queries are malformed since they index only the properly formed content on their site.
Thus, in view of the foregoing, there is a need for systems and methods that overcome the limitations and drawbacks of the prior art. In particular, there is a need for system whereby end-users can search against partners' content at Internet search engines. There is also a need for a system that can correct malformed queries and structure such queries for resolution by partners without overwhelming partners with irrelevant requests for information. The present invention provides such a solution.